My father, Jim Boardman, who has died aged 97, was a career soldier who joined the army at the age of 15 and saw action from Normandy to Hamburg in the second world war. He and his regiment arrived on Juno beach in July 1944 and fought through to Germany and the war’s end the following year.
One of five children, Jim was born in Withyham, East Sussex, where his parents, Gladys (nee Shed) and Harry, ran a pub. Jim attended school in Groombridge and left at 14. He joined the army on his 15th birthday in March 1939 as European peace disintegrated. Once the war began, he moved through training areas up and down the UK until the Normandy landings began in June 1944.
He was wounded when his scout car hit a mine towards the end of the Normandy campaign, suffering a broken ankle and broken nose, but returned to the front in Holland during the winter of 1944. He served several times in Germany after the war, on active service in Korea in 1951-52 and in Egypt during 1953-54.
He met Joan Richardson in Northumberland while he was based there in 1943. They married in 1946. They had five children and lived in 27 different army houses.
Jim rose through the ranks and was commissioned in 1963. The last years of his active service were with the Army Air Corps, where he served in Cyprus during the emergency of 1964. While adjudant at the Air Corps base in Netheravon, Wiltshire, in 1965, he was the officer in command of the army unit deployed to surround the Beatles for the sequence on Salisbury Plain in their film Help!.
He retired from active service with the rank of captain in 1970. He worked in a bank for a while but was then appointed the secretary of his regiment, the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, a position he held for 17 years. During these years he planned and began regimental visits to the communities that they had liberated in Normandy and the Netherlands. These links and visits continue to this day.
In retirement he wrote two books. Tracks in Europe (1990) is a soldier’s account of his regiment at war and Tracks in Korea (2013), is his history of the regiment during the Korean war.
He and Joan lived in Cotebrook, Cheshire, until 2002 when they moved to Louth, Lincolnshire. Jim was a keen gardener and loved fishing.
Joan survives him, as do four children, Janet, Bernard, Richard and me, 10 grandchildren, nine great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren. His youngest son, Andrew, died in 2018.
